Turn it up

Arcade Fire on 'Bible,' chocolate fountains

May 18, 2007|By Greg Kot, Tribune music critic

At the start of a tour that brings Montreal's Arcade Fire in for three sold-out shows this weekend at the Chicago Theatre, a few band members discussed key songs and moments in a short, sudden, and highly successful career.

* One riveting song on the new Arcade Fire album, "Neon Bible," is "Antichrist Television Blues." It's a surging narrative that describes the toxic relationship between a Svengali father and his child-star daughter.

Singer-songwriter Win Butler: "That song is trying to understand something about modern culture. There is this cultural distortion or feedback look that happens when artists try and make themselves into a mirror in which their fans can see themselves. The sad thing is that behind all of these female teen stars, no matter how freely they feel like they are expressing themselves, are these perverted middle-aged men."

Butler's wife, multi-instrumentalist and singer Regine Chassagne, tap-dances on the tune: "It was my way of becoming the girl in the song --the child star. And here's her little dance."

* The band surged from relative unknowns in 2004 to Coachella and Lollapalooza-festival headliners in 2005. How did the band handle that sudden transformation?

Bassist Tim Kingsbury: "It did happen fast. Going into releasing [the 2004 debut] 'Funeral' we were optimistic. We felt it was good."

Violinist Sarah Neufeld: "But the scale was surprising. When the first pressing sold out, it was really weird. It set us up for the next surprise. Each surprise prepared us for the next. The shows sold out, the record sold 100,000, it kept leading from one to the next."

Kingsbury: "It wasn't like we couldn't cope. It was weird but it didn't flip everything upside down."

Neufeld: "We were still doing everything ourselves. We were still driving ourselves around in a van. We weren't all of a sudden propelled into stardom and this easy rock star life and there were chocolate fountains everywhere."

Kingsbury: "Those didn't come until we went to the Grammys."

Neufeld: "We didn't win, but the chocolate fountains at the parties were my favorite part."

* Win Butler's younger brother Will is the band's wild-card on stage. When not banging on keyboards, drums or the nearest available surface, he's wrapping band members in duct tape, trying to start fires and generally spazzing out. He is the marshal of onstage mayhem. How did he become such a troublemaking showman?

Will Butler: "It comes from not playing an instrument on certain songs, not needing to add another instrument there. So you might as well do something with a little more intent."

Chassagne: "When it became a style in indie-rock, where people dressed down and looked at their shoes, I found that really boring."

Will Butler: "I was turned on by 'Stop Making Sense,' the Talking Heads concert video, when I was 15. That was cool. Thinking about David Byrne's weird dancing and how the stage set was put together really excited me. I wasn't so much turned off by [the attitude] of grunge. I was turned on by thinking about weird things."